Chinese seafood firm Joyvio Food has completely divested from Chilean salmon-farming firm Australis Seafood, selling its stake to a fellow firm also under the umbrella of the Joyvio Group for the symbolic price of CNY 1.00 (USD 0.14, EUR 0.12).
Australis will be transferred to Joyvio Premium Fresh in a move that will now consider “potential strategic options” for Australis, which may include bringing new investors on board to enhance working capital and to support future expansion plans.
The restructuring is also expected to strengthen Joyvio Food’s net asset position and “create room for future operational improvements,” according to Joyvio parent company Legend Holdings’ filing on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Joyvio Food has been struggling financially, and its losses have increased the risk of the company getting delisted from Shenzhen.
During the first quarter of 2025, Joyvio Food’s revenues fell to CNY 678 million (USD 93 million, EUR 81.6 million), a 34.1 percent drop when compared to the same quarter in 2024. In the same time frame, net losses more than doubled to CNY 181 million (USD 24.8 million, EUR 21.8 million). Australis also reported a Q1 2025 before-tax loss of CNY 16.5 million (USD 2.3 million, EUR 2 million).
The company harvested 8,309 metric tons of Atlantic salmon whole fish equivalent in the period, marking a 43 percent drop year over year while ex-cage costs increased 2.4 percent to USD 6.45 (EUR 5.66) per kilogram compared to USD 6.30 (EUR 5.53) per kilogram in the year-ago period.
Its losses for the full year of 2024 approached CNY 122 million (USD 16.7 million, EUR 14.7 million).
Problems for Joyvio began long before that, however.
It purchased Australis from Chilean businessman Isidoro Quiroga in 2018 for USD 921 million (EUR 808 million).
Following the sale, Joyvio alleged Quiroga engaged in hiding, falsifying, and adulterating critical information during the sales process, including what the company now deems was deliberate overproduction to inflate salmon production numbers and, therefore, the company’s valuation when it came time to negotiate a sale.
In 2022, Australis filed a self-report regarding overproduction with Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA).
The next year, Joyvio filed a lawsuit against Quiroga seeking USD 1.22 billion (EUR 1.07 billion) in restitution and damages and accused Quiroga and former Australis executives of fraud and unfair administration. The defendants have called the accusations “falsehoods and slander,” questioning why the accusations surfaced years after the purchase.
Joyvio recently expanded its lawsuit for fraud to include Australis Seafoods’ former legal and regulatory manager Rubén Henríquez. The brief accused Henríquez of having participated in what Joyvio describes as a structural operational model based on overproduction.
The suit charges that during the due diligence process of the sale, Henríquez allegedly omitted key information on possible environmental violations and that he allegedly received a USD 750,000 (EUR 658,000) bonus following the sale of the company to Joyvio.
In January, Chile’s Prosecutor's Office specifically accused Quiroga and former executives Martín Guiloff and Santiago Garretón of fraud and unfair administration.
Prosecutor Constanza Encina maintained that the defendants fraudulently inflated Australis’s sale price by USD 620 million (EUR 544 million) after allegedly having developed “a plan of sustained overproduction over time … planned and executed maliciously by the defendants with the aim of fictitiously increasing the value of the company and appearing to have a greater production capacity and profitability, with total indifference to the environmental and sanctioning consequences that this could entail.”
The case is still under investigation by the Public Prosecutor's Office, which established a 180-day period to investigate.
Quiroga’s family office has responded that the move “is the latest demonstration of the false and instrumental nature of Joyvio's actions … that does not present new antecedents, insists on falsehoods that have already been denied, and is directed against the person who denounced having been the victim of threats and offers of payment by representatives of Joyvio to falsely incriminate the Quiroga family and former directors and executives of Australis for crimes that did not exist.”
Henríquez had previously denounced having received threats and offers from Joyvio representatives to falsely incriminate Quiroga and other former Australis executives.
